Dropping

We may or may not go off the fiscal cliff at midnight, but if we do, it’ll be part of a proud American tradition of dropping things from high places on New Year’s Eve. Most famous, of course, is the ball drop at Times Square, but there are many others, according to the Wikipedia. I’m not sure that anyone’s ever tried dropping anything quite so large as an entire electorate, but that’s what makes this so exciting! The secret to American greatness, after all, is that we make everything bigger. (Well, O.K., maybe that’s not so secret.) And hey, you know what else has dropped? “Congress’ approval rating is perilously close to the margin of error for none at all,” reports the Roll Call.

I’m proud to say that Pennsylvania has the most New Year’s Eve droppings of any state. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows the state’s history as Landfill Central and industrial sacrifice area for energy extraction and production. The same civic leaders who endorse the dropping of giant French fries, pickles, lollipops and stuffed goats on New Year’s are happy to invite other states and multinational corporations to leave their droppings all over the commonwealth. The party’s on us! The only way we could make the forced gaiety and over-indulgence of our annual New Year’s celebration more festive would be to dance around a bonfire of state forest trees, clear-cut to build fracking well pads, compressor stations and transmission corridors.

In other news, tens of thousands of virtual pets were snuffed out by Zynga yesterday when it shut down PetVille. If only it had waited 24 hours, we could have dropped them off the tops of virtual buildings. Because nothing says Happy New Year like the electronic squeal of a falling puppy.